Sunday, January 22, 2012

What Will Mitt Romney Do When A Genuine Free Market Comes To America?

Whatever his other shortcomings, I get plenty of entertainment from watching Mitt Romney on the news. His personality type — privileged white boy, executive-type hair, born with a silver foot in his mouth — reminds me of how much I miss Dan Quayle. And he — and his defenders — have certainly provided entertainment value the past few days.

Romney’s primary opponents have been jumping on him for his record at Bain Capital — referring to it, variously, as a “chop shop” or “vulture capitalist” operation that buys up enterprises, downsizes their workforces, strips them of assets, loads them up with debt as cash cows, then throws them away.

Their criticism comes across as somewhat less than authentic; when, under any other circumstances, has someone like Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin or Rick Perry had a problem with that model of capitalism? For that matter, what Romney did as a venture capitalist is essentially what Fortune 500 companies do with all the corporations they acquire from mergers and acquisitions — and frequently with the enterprises they already owned. That’s just what most pointy-haired MBAs do. So one suspects an element of disingenuousness in the moral outrage coming from Gingrich and Perry.

But what’s really hilarious is the response from Romney and his surrogates. Some Romney flack on a talking head show wrung her hands over what a shame it was to hear “criticism of the free market” coming from Republicans. And whoever’s turn it was inside the barrel writing boilerplate for the WSJ editorial page clutched their pearls at such “crude and damaging caricatures of modern business and capitalism,” calling on Romney to “base his claim to office on a defense of the system of free enterprise that has enriched America over the decades and is now under assault.”

Romney himself is aghast at “class warfare” and the “politics of envy” from Republicans who sound like “socialists,” scolding that “President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial. … In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him.”

Hearing all these encomiums on “free enterprise,” and equations of the Romney vulture capitalist model of “modern business and capitalism” to the “free market,” reminds me of an old Russian joke from the Brezhnev years.

Brezhnev, on the occasion of a visit from his old mother from her rural village, went out of his way to impress on her that he’d made good. He showed her his closet full of tailored suits. They rode around in his chauffeured Zil, visited his vacation dacha on the Crimean Sea, and went shopping at the GUM department store for which only the Soviet elite had membership cards. The old lady remained silent through the whole tour. Finally, the disappointed Brezhnev pressed her for a reaction. “This is all very nice, Leonid,” she said. “But what will happen to you if the communists take over?”

Forty years later and on the other side of the world, listen to this gaggle of crony capitalists, monopolists, corporate welfare queens, Gordon Gekko wannabes, and pet ideologists at Pravda (ahem — The Wall Street Journal) talk about our “free enterprise system” makes me want to ask: “That’s all very nice, Mitt. But what will you do if the free marketers take over?”

When a genuine free market comes to America, I expect the Fortune 500 and the banksters will fare about as well as would Brezhnev & Co. had the workers taken over.

In a sense, Mitt and his stooges are correct to refer to criticism as “class warfare.” As Prussian strategist Karl von Clausewitz argued, a war is not started by the country that moves its troops across a frontier. The invader would like nothing better than to carry off the invasion without a single gunshot. The actual war starts when the invaded country’s army starts shooting back. Likewise, a lot of sensible folks like to point out that we’ve had a class war for all of human history — it’s been waged by the privileged, exploiting classes on the rest of us. But to be perfectly accurate, it only becomes a genuine class war when we start fighting back.

Why don't you actually read some of Kevin Carson's BOOKS (they're available free online). Without the state, do you really think Romney and other crony capitalists could get away with what they do? If so, you haven't even begun to think about the issue.

Not only would the wealthy continue to exploit people without the state, they would do it more.

Explain how they would "do it more", without the state there to enforce their privilege and control and without the state subsidies that allow their exploitation to continue. Instead of just regurgitating statist bullshit, think a little.

You just repeat what you hear anarchists say and you accuse me of regurgitating... hilarious.

Who can afford the muscle in an anarchy? Who stops those with money in an anarchy? No one, that's who.

There is no difference between anarchy and exploitation of the poor; they are one in the same. The poor have been exploited throughout history, but they are LEAST exploited in systems of highly regulated markets. You if you knew the first thing about history or how other countries work, this would be apparent to you.

Your ideology is stupid, short-sighted, unthinking, uncaring, and utterly retarded. Anarchy is the dumbest pipe dream to ever be adopted by white men of privilege.

If the post you are commenting on is more than 30 days old, your comment will have to await approval before being published. Rest assured, however, that as long as it is not spam, it will be published in due time.

Facebook

More Economic Depression News! More Fun! More Happiness! More Links! More Videos! More Jokes! More Cartoons! More Pro-Liberty Articles! More Fiction, Stories and Reviews! More Information Than Ever Before!

Learn About The Coming Depression Here!

This is your source for daily coming depression news! Email this site to your family, friends, co-workers! Spread the word so we can continue bringing you the best economic collapse news and links!

To be an individualist and libertarian is to understand that no one, anywhere, should ever be aggressed against by anyone, and that the state is the principal form of institutionalized aggression in our world.— Anthony Gregory

"Political tags, such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth, are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."-- Robert A. Heinlein

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants."--Thomas Jefferson

"Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast." - Mark Twain

"The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization." - Robert Anton Wilson